On Oct. 4, 2011, Annie Nicholson received a call from her sister: Nearly every member of their immediate family had been in a horrific helicopter crash on the East River.

“I remember jumping out of bed,” said the London-based artist, who has never publicly told her story before. “I said, ‘Why would you say this to me?’ I went around to my friend’s bedroom and I was asking him to speak to [my sister, Amanda Moore] and tell her that what she was saying wasn’t true … I was asking him to pinch me.”

Annie, now 35, was originally supposed to join her parents, Harriet and Paul, and her sister Sonia Marra, and Sonia’s partner, Helen Tamaki, in Manhattan to celebrate Sonia’s 40th birthday. But she stayed behind for her job at the British Film Institute (Amanda also didn’t go). An old family friend, Paul Dudley, who ran the Linden Municipal Airport in New Jersey, had offered to take the group on a sightseeing tour aboard a helicopter.

Within moments of taking off from the 34th Street heliport, the chopper started spinning out of control. It crashed into the East River upside down and immediately began to sink. Dudley and Paul Nicholson, in the front of the vehicle, escaped quickly. The others weren’t so lucky, with Sonia trapped under water for more than two hours. (The National Transportation Safety Board later ruled that the helicopter was at least 28 pounds overweight.)

By the time Annie got the news, Sonia, 40, was dead and their 60-year-old mother was in a coma. Helen, 43, was brain-damaged but alive. Paul Nichsolson had minor injuries; Dudley escaped unscathed.

“I came to New York with nothing. Not even a phone,” Annie recalled. The feeling was one of “just absolutely blind terror.”

She and Moore headed to Bellevue Hospital to meet their father, then 71.

“He told me he remembered being really deep in the ocean. That blackness,” Annie said. “He was diving down trying to get [the others] and he said he felt a wrist and he knew it was my sister’s wrist and he was trying to get her out and couldn’t.”

Helen died from injuries a week after the crash. For a while, it looked like Harriet would survive.

“She was getting stronger,” said Annie of her mother. “She started walking every day.” Things looked so promising that Harriet told her daughter to go back to London and she’d fly there to meet her the following week. Annie left town eager for her mother’s arrival in England.

“And then we lost her,” Annie said of Harriet, who died Nov. 6, 2011 after suddenly having difficulty breathing. According to officials, she suffered respiratory complications related to her near-drowning.

“There’s nothing quite like the loss of your mom,” Annie added. “The two people closest to me were my mom and [Sonia] . . . The person I would have turned to [to grieve with] is another person who is dead.”

Annie has struggled with survivors’ guilt that led to depression and suicidal thoughts.

“I imagined that, because the helicopter crashed because of a weight issue, if I had gone, there would have been different people [in the helicopter] and it wouldn’t have happened,” she said.

Ultimately, the family declined to pursue legal action against Dudley.

“We just felt that it would add to our trauma and never bring back what we lost,” said Annie. She feels Dudley was negligent but accepts that it was an accident.

Annie Nicholson in front of her 180-foot mural in Williamsburg, completed two weeks ago.Zandy Mangold

The irony is that, previously, the family had been focused on her father’s survival, after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2005.

“We had been preparing to lose him for so long. And he survived,” Annie said. “I think that added to some sense of guilt [for him].”

Paul Nicholson passed away in 2016.

Two years ago, Annie was in New York again and visited the crash site.

“It was enormously confronting and emotional,” she said.

As an artist who goes by the name The Fandangoe Kid, she credits her work for easing her despair. Two weeks ago, she unveiled a 180-foot mural in Williamsburg, on Bedford Avenue at North 8th Street, which is an ode to her family. Painted in vibrant pink, blue and yellow, it reads: “Make your legacy golden.”

“It’s about rethinking the legacy of being one of the last people left in my immediate family … and thinking about how you can have control over that legacy and what you choose to leave behind,” she said.

“I could have really died from a broken heart,” Annie said. Instead, she is embracing positivity.

“Yes it’s a tragedy … but there’s nothing tragic about what I come from at all.”